How the world is failing Palestine

May 21, 2021, Friday, 2 AM Israeli local time: an Egypt-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect, ending the recent 11-day Israeli bombardment of Gaza. All told, the attack on the besieged Palestinian strip claimed the lives of 248 Palestinians, including 66 children.

May 21, 2021, Friday, noon Israeli local time: Israeli police attacked Muslim worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque who had gathered there for Friday prayers. It was done to prevent them from marching from Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Old City to celebrate the ceasefire. Stun grenades and gas bombs were used to disperse them.

May 23, 2021, Sunday: Israeli police in a written statement said that as part of "Operation Law and Order", "Large forces of police and border fighters, including the corps' reserve companies, will operate with high intensity and comprehensive deployment against anyone involved in the violent incidents that have befallen the State of Israel in the past two weeks."

The statement added that already, 1,550 arrests have been made since May 9, 2021, and more than 150 indictments have been filed against Palestinian citizens of Israel. In a statement sent to Al Jazeera, General Director of Adalah—The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Hassan Jabareen, called the measure a "militarised war against Palestinian citizens of Israel", adding that it is being done to "intimidate and to exact revenge on Palestinian citizens of Israel—'to settle the score' with Palestinians, in the Israeli police's own words—for their political positions and activities."

Given the tone of the Israeli police's statement, one cannot downplay the significance of Hassan Jabareen's comment. Israel's ruthless brutality against the Palestinians is nothing new, and one can only imagine the force that will be used to exact revenge on the demonstrators.

The swift vengeful actions of the Israeli government only expose the flimsiness of their ceasefire with Hamas. And there is a reason why this truce is just a stopgap measure to put a band-aid over a wound that will only continue to fester below the surface: the apparent impunity of Israel's actions.

Israel's staunchest ally—the US—could not muster a strongly worded message to condemn the atrocities committed during the recent bombardment of Gaza. Germany supported Israel's actions, calling it self-defence.

But it is also true that at one point, the majority of the world leaders voiced their concerns over Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza, whatever their words might have been. For "rogue" nations such as Iran or North Korea, such deviation from globally acceptable behaviour would have resulted in arms embargo, sanctions and other forms of concerted actions from the international community.

However, Israel just seems to be luckier than the others. 

Despite the recent atrocities committed by Israel in the name of self-defence, the US government has proceeded with an arms sale of USD 735 million to Israel. The sale includes Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that can turn "dumb" bombs—also called unguided bombs—into precision-guided missiles. The Biden administration has approved the sale, which the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended saying Washington is "committed to giving Israel the means to defend itself."

And these ammunitions that the US, Germany, UK and Italy, among other countries, sell to Israel are used in the suppression of the Palestinians, including even the killing of civilians. Any Middle East watcher would remember the Israeli missile attack on a UN school in Rafah on August 3, 2014—during the Israeli invasion of Gaza—that claimed the lives of 10 shelter seekers.

The UN later revealed that a US-made Hellfire missile was used by Israel to attack the school, meaning it was a US weapon that had the blood of children on it. In the aftermath of the revelation, many arms supplying countries including the UK and Spain announced reviews of their export of military equipment to Israel, but the US continued supplying further Hellfire missiles to Israel, a country that, for obvious reasons, stands accused of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Apart from proactive arms sales to Israel—despite Israel's history of human rights abuses—the US continues to provide the country with an annual USD 3.8 billion foreign military aid, as part of a deal to provide USD 38 billion to Israel in military aid over a period of 10 years, inked in 2016 in the last days of the Obama presidency.

And the US has been providing military aid and equipment to Israel for decades, especially since the 1967 war. During a conversation with Al Jazeera, Stephen Walt, an international affairs professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, suggested that arms sales has increased since the 1960s as a result of Washington's promise "that if Israel would withdraw from the Sinai and sign the peace treaty with Egypt, that [it] would basically guarantee a certain level of military aid every year."

This US military "aid" to Israel remains unconditional. Recent attempts by some liberal senators to regulate the assistance have been met with vehement opposition by pro-Israeli groups, which say conditioning US military aid to Israel would diminish Israel's ability to defend itself. More than 300 US legislators signed a letter urging the US government to keep the "aid" unconditional.   

But the fact remains, Israel is using arms and aid provided by the US and other allies to commit war crimes against a suppressed people, whom they have displaced and dispossessed to create a land for themselves.

The lack of global consensus against Israel means that state-of-the-art jets and smart bombs can be brought to bear against the civilian population of the Gaza strip. In the most recent bout of violence by Israel, the most effective weapons of the Palestinians were not the homespun rockets of Hamas, but the defiance of the civilians in their resilience in the face of a military attack.

Perhaps the helplessness and resilience of the Palestinian people—or humanity in general—was best expressed by a video that went viral on social media showing a Palestinian woman, Maryam al-Afifi, smiling after being attacked and arrested by Israeli police in Sheikh Jarrah.

This act of defiance speaks of the plight of a stateless people, who found themselves on the wrong side of history through no fault of their own, and now smile stoically at their own fate. Yet, this is a people that refuse to fade away, despite overwhelming odds. Forever on edge, their path to survival remains as precarious as ever.

Their journey towards self-determination has been made even more perilous by an incapable United Nations (the US has vetoed at least 53 Security Council resolutions against or critical of Israel in the last five decades), the vested geo-political interests of the west in the resource-rich Middle East, and the failure of the international justice system to hold Israel and its allies accountable for the human rights abuses and war crimes committed against Palestinians. The road ahead is long and riddled with danger.

But how long can the world continue to watch this gaping wound fester, before Palestine's time finally runs out?

Tasneem Tayeb is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her Twitter handle is: @tasneem_tayeb